Posting News and Other Announcements is a Legitimate Use of Social Media, but, Often, an Ineffective Method of Driving Engagement

We have never been big proponents of using Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media as a method of letting an audience know our whereabouts, or what we may be up to at any particular time. In fact, we see little use for this type of online content creation to be of use to businesses in need of product promotion. Rather, we make a lot of use of each of these venues to post news and announcements of client products, services, and even commentary (crafted in the form of blog posts around products and services).

Nevertheless, we can’t claim good results from this type of active tacticv of online product promotion. We think the best return on the time invested in posting news and announcements is still to be found in the legacy activity of posting press releases. In other words, the prime audience for news, in our opinion, remains an audience of journalists, who, in turn, can craft follow up content around a company’s announcements and news to better reach specific communities of readers.

Our attitude about press releases is that they are, largely, a mandatory effort for clients targeting business audiences, but not an effort that produces much in the way of tangible results. The publishers that we work with appear to be aware of this gap. Most of them — PR Newswire, PRWeb, Businesswire — now offer the tools that product marketers require to track how press releases are distributed, the individuals, organizations, and even businesses that apparently open and read them. Nevertheless, in our experience, there is still a pronounced gap between all of this information and any truly useful indication of how an audience actually engages with the information.

Rather, we are working on including text within the press releases that we craft for clients that, literally, drives engagement, whether that text amounts to a invitation to register for a webinar, or to obtain one’s own copy of some new information. In fact, we see little reason today to produce press releases that do not include some form of call to action on the part of the reader. We simply don’t see the return on investment by simply publishing news for a presumed audience of journalists, who, in fact, are no longer to be found online reading this kind of content.

The best method we’ve found of crafting a real opportunity for engagement from a tweet on a piece of news, or an announcement is through an annotation that has prompted engagement for us in the past.

In the next two posts to this blog we will present some of our thoughts on discussion groups as a method of driving engagement with an audience.